Child
Speak not of death even in jest
Such talk ill suits your childhood
Your beauty

You walked across our little fence
From one end to the other
When a day or two later you attempted the same
You said that fear of falling had made you fall

Small fowls make melody
Emitting their ravishing commands
A hillbilly Get off my land
Or a cavalier Come hither love to me

The wingèd multitude
The mockingbirds the cardinals the bobolinks the Kentucky warblers
That thrush that in America we call a robin
And all the anonymous throng

They do not intend to propagate beauty
Any more than the sunset
The lapping wave
The pastoral flower

Each species its unique apparatus
Even that of sublime mockery
Immense vibration
From each diminutive frame

The ephemeral song eternal
We call it song
It takes a reasoning brain
To appreciate

Up to the brim and even above the brim

I could see that it was molting hard
That avian apparition
And I felt the ache of envy rise within me
O to shed my mammalian skin
As had the wingèd visitor its feathers

I’ve always watched for signs and portents
Silly I know
Even pretending to determine
How things will work out one way or another
Not as easy as you might think to deceive oneself

The prismatic edge of a drop of water
Waiting suspended on the invariant spout
The progress of a sore throat
When one side is more inflamed than the other
The transit of the moon behind the clouds

That ceaseless barking
The sound of trucks on the highway
The mottled discoloration of the brickwork
The overheard speech with my bad hearing
The bird’s new life and my old age

So much I already know
It isn’t worse for me I know
Somebody always has it worse
Someone will be sad when I die
I will be sad when somebody dies

The subjective world is just that
A world
Infinitely expanding and complex
A complex network of attitudes
Perceptions foresights and hindsights
As we discover when the doors of perception
Are cleansed

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment
And let me add to Blake’s demonic observation
That sensual enjoyment often resides
In personal interaction
But also occurs in interactions
With those artificially-devised subjectivities
Namely works of art

And so to my theme
The Catholic Church left me
With dread that has persisted
From childhood into my old age
And yet amid the dread I find gratitude
For Sister Nathaniel at Our Lady of Sorrows
And for my second-grade teacher Mrs. O’Connor

All the persons we know are humans alas
Weak vulnerable rather pathetic organisms
We do not find gratitude in the animal kingdom
Gratitude an emotional posture of reason
For I have reason or have not
To acknowledge the benefaction of another
Or indeed their destructive ill will

Therefore do I hereby retract the innuendo
That I have been left with only dread
For in the immense precincts of subjectivity
Dread shares its quarters with other less destructive moods
Such as thankfulness approval and love
But I am forced to admit
Not tranquility

For in 1962 when I was learning to dread the pains of hell
That psychotic nightmare
I lived each day in frank terror of nuclear weapons
And of their hell fire
And of the crystalline perfection of Communist evil
That somehow would become God’s instrument
For my punishment

And to this day I hate myself as a scaredy-cat
Even as I reason that less objectionable traits
Must surely lodge somewhere in the recesses
Of my character
And why the traits that might give strength recede
While devastating dread and self-damnation dominate
I do not know though I have my suspicions

Parents schools
Don’t punish your kids
Neither listen to the lie
That success matters most
Nor hear nor repeat
The stupid rhetorical question
How else will they learn to be good

Something substantial
Something of a heft
Tell a story

Once upon a time
There was one holy catholic and apostolic church
That taught the young
To dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell
And to avoid the near occasion
Of offense to God
Who is all good
And deserving of all love

And somebody once designated me
Anti-Christian
But I do not oppose Christianity
But merely acknowledge
The great departure

The departure of love
Of deserving
Of God
Of heaven
Even of loss
And I am left
With dread

The dread of pain
Of hell
Of offense
Especially of that which is all good
For who can conceive of or tolerate
Such crystalline perfection
Even in the light of one’s own wickedness
So partial
So impure
So mediocre

I punished myself when I was young
Punching my chest to stop my heart
Ineffectual blasphemy
Failure to usurp divine authority
I didn’t punch hard enough
Hatred vitiated by pity

Don’t expect substance
Don’t expect heft
If you lack the will
To go all the way
Unforgivable cowardice

Ruined at the outset
Craving approval
And deserving none
Begging for mercy
And hearing silence or condemnation
And who was ever motivated
By command

And yet behold the multitude
Cheerful in simple faith
Bemused no doubt by one
Unwilling to take the simple first step
Or the last

Something worth a damn
Something to be proud of
Deadly pride that twists the heart
Something substantial

And now we find ourselves in a great emergency
That demands bold action
That disdains a whimpering child
In the guise of an oafish greybeard
That demands something heftier
Than a tale of piteous contempt
Violent aversion
And self-serving blame

Thou beloved
Fixture of long habit
And always something more

Little demon
Who says to me Who cares
And always something more

Weary stale flat unprofitable
Stifled drowsy unimpassioned
Something that is gone
Now can see no more

Melancholy long withdrawing
Unaware
Nor hope nor health nor peace within nor calm
Close the door on me

Akcorn woi cirtus locqvump

Affairs of state must take precedent
Over the affairs of state

In the movies you can tell
When the person flying
Is suspended on a wire
Paolo and Francesca rotate and revolve
Elements in an automatic armillary

The tortoise shouts
That same force that drives the flower
Vertebrates and invertebrates in tidal congregation
Organisms of all kingdoms in congress
Even the asexual on the move

Genetic orthographic variation
Sometimes catastrophic
Sometimes beneficial
Usually inert
Nor crisis nor panacea following the script

The actor orates
Driving sound past the pasteboard mask
The tragedian falls
The comedian springs up again
The unseen will unseeable

First let us acknowledge that these are bad words
Forbidden words
Seditious words
Hysterical vision and bride
Psychopathology originating in the uterus
Or of any other organ
Nevertheless hormones and such
Of any sex
Physical pain physical pleasure
Conducing to psychological effect
And who is to say

And in the second place vision
Along the line
That inveterate game of telephone
A neurological phenomenon
Impossible to pinpoint
Powerless to efface
The coordinates
That define
The advent of catastrophe
Rarely of blessing
Mostly catastrophe
And is it true that some authority must authorize
That definition
And who authorizes the authority

She was undressed by her suitors
Who identified themselves as such
Uncorroborated by the bride herself
Unasked whether she would endorse
This laudatory appellation
And afterward the suitor
I have suffered
Much later she says
I should have said
I should have said

Uncle married Mother
Consequently
I talk to skulls
Dress in black
Write sonnets
Counseling my beloved
To suicide

Alchemical Infusion

As a child delights in the diffraction of squinting
As the German tourist focused so intently
On the coach down the third-base line
As if that were the essence of the game

How the mind shuttles
Between the special and the general
The leukocyte and the circulatory system
Which is really the circulo-pulmonary system
Or the circulo-pulmonary-digestive system

Add immunity
Add neurology
Add topography
Add genetics
Add astrophysics

The uniqueness of a donax
On a beach that stretches for miles
And the rotating tide that straddles the Gulf Stream

Add social norms and individual responsibility
Add cultural practices and the infinite postures of affect
Add the wisdom and error of the ages and the first time
You noticed that bird song
A stately solitary
Poo-tweet

I sat quietly upon a bench
A bluebird
Swear to God it was a bluebird
Flitted down to the sidewalk near me

Hello bluebird
I silently said
Joyful at the sight of it

The bird cocked its head
And flew far out of sight

I’m sorry bluebird
That I existed
At that place
At that time

To free the living quicksilver
From its pulverulent prison

The woodworker makes his renunciation

The cherub astride the dolphin
But not the Victorian cyclists

The god who drives the storm
But not the fictional hero of intellect

The carrier wave full of aggressive demands
But not the principle of cellular division

I am a part of all that I have met

I was seven
I knew right from wrong
Or had been told I did
I had reached the age of reason
Along with everybody else
In the second grade

It was time to go to confession
In preparation for Holy Communion
Not my first
But first the examination of conscience
This from experience I knew I could not do

I knew I had sinned plenty
But I could call to mind
None of my offenses
I could carry no effort to its conclusion
I lacked application
And so I lied

I told the priest that I had stolen
A piece of candy from my little brother
Then you must return it to him
Even my childish understanding
Heard the absurdity of the command
But I ate it already
Warming and developing the fiction
Then you must give him money

That night or sometime
Shortly thereafter
I asked my father for a nickel
I never told my brother
Why I gave it to him
Nor you Dear Reader
This memorial
To the invented sin

You can read all of Emily Dickinson
And never know that the Civil War happened
Walt Whitman reported from the thick of it
Tending to the dying and the industrially maimed

The great crisis inspired Melville to the worst poetry
Up they climbed without rail or banister
Spite of grapeshot [something] and canister
Rhymed couplets not his forte

So here comes the almighty I
The great DK Lord of Erudition
Dickinson great poems
Whitman great

Welcome aboard Herman
Up let us climb together
I won’t even attempt a rhyme
Or rely upon any other fucking banister

We have naught for death but toys

He could now be taken seriously
For he had forsworn Lite beer and candy bars
He could devote his formidable erudition
To the expression of his unique
If unprepossessing self

From a distance in the fog
The illuminated sign atop the bridge
Seemed a beacon of triumph
Or a vigil for Santa Lúcia
Whereas in fact it merely enjoined
A speed not to exceed 25 MPH

And in dreams the mighty bridge
Seemed to rise and never crest
And who should attempt its crossing on foot
Would know the meaning of acrophobia
One must never take such steps lightly

And how do we decide and when
That some course of action threatens
So much peril as to preclude its undertaking

A question not to be asked
As if a private problem were a universal law
As if anyone were capable
Of such questions in dreams
As if a gorgoneion were unavailable
For a sum of money

For in dreams we find ourselves
Upon the throne of the blessed sun himself
The planets processing in stately polonaise
Stepping and bowing and displaying their regalia
Like the obedient courtiers they are

Renounce renounce
Fear and lust
Take labor and hardship for your lot
It’s not a foul rag and bone shop
It’s a customer service desk
Efficient and clean
Behind which I have secretly
Composed this document

Regarding oneself as a product of the times
Is a hardy perennial
A transhistorical fact
An ineluctable modality

Condemned to vulgarity
Barely capable of commencing
Much less completing
The introversion of the quest

Failing to resolve the dire antinomies
As of subject and object
Mind and nature
Self and soul

Failing to adopt
And indeed actively renouncing
The humanist lexicon
The centrality of free thought

Options abound
One could hire an automatic writer
School at sex drugs or mysicism
Scrape away at the neocortex

Or stage dive
Into the uniform crowd
The random enthusiasts
Influence influence influence

Meditate upon pop stars and restaurants
Postures and proposals
Cliches and bon mots
And the fall from a terrifyingly great height

To complain
Of sad disorder
A naive fantasy
Of primal order

I have a hard time saying my own name
I have a hard time making this work
This is not funny
This is far from serious
A line of cars was end-stopped
And therefore not enjambed

The fruit of experience and not the fruit
Of experience
Lungs and suffers
The rapes of graft
The found and the çurly
The voice flat and unimpassioned
Like that of one who knows something
Good morning Dr. Spooner

Surly some revelation is at hand
Close at hand or father away
What are the fingers called
The little one near the tip of the nose
The ring finger near the bridge
The thumb between the cheekbone and the ear
The other two on the brow
And the rest

Aleatory nuances
Otherwise pretensions
Presumptions
Pomposities
Affectations
And other exaltations

Press the claws into the flesh
Withdraw the claws violently
With gouts of flesh

Tune in tune in
Only remember
Only sever
Only connect
To alight upon tall cold places
And leave the marshes behind

O to be a wicked youth again
Tumbling wet yet through the steamy marshes
Not yet the docile seated elder
Among those conscious of their reverenditude
Upon their stone benches
The thumb between the cheekbone and the ear